Shade of Silhouettes

photo "Shade of Silhouettes" (above) by Tyler Malone aka The Second Shooter

The shadowy figures were looking in on the captive with great interest. There was a mist that was shifting across the room that made the shadows seem all the less distinct. The entire room seemed to be saying perpetually. There was a kind of exhaustion about everything which wouldn’t exactly be defined. It was what it was. And it was exactly what the shadows didn’t want at that moment.

The captive told the shadows that they would have what they wanted from him over his dead body.

The shadows considered this. The captive could hear the shadows whispering to themselves as they huddled together. Perhaps now it was his turn to wait. It was his turn to sigh. It was his turn to consider the full weight of the situation. He had no idea what they wanted. He just knew that he didn’t have to give them anything. He didn’t owe them anything. He didn’t…

“When you say we can have what we want over your dead body,” the whispers began, “does that mean that when we kill you what we want from you will appear over your dead body and then we can claim it? Or perhaps what you mean is actually quite different than what you say.”

The captive desperately wanted to run his hands over his face. Or at least sigh in some way other than the way he had just sighed when he was waiting for them to finish their conference with each other. Really there is no way it was going to happen in any real significant way. When you’re tied to a chair, you really don’t have much in the way of anything that could be a satisfying expression of frustration. All the captive could really do was simply sit there and consider his options as to how to explain.

“It’s a figure of speech. It just means that I won’t give you what you want, or something.” His eyes glazed over into the haze of the shadows. He felt the room begin to spin and he knew that it wasn’t amidst shadows that were there even though he knew they weren’t.

It was a very straightforward way of answering the question. And he didn’t actually know whether or not he had actually spoken those words. Or perhaps they were just what he was thinking at that moment. He had no way of knowing one or the other exactly what was going on with respect to his own mouth at that moment. Because he had been bathing in the shadows for long enough. He had been absconded by them for long enough that he really had no idea exactly what it was that they may or may not have been doing at that moment. It was all very frustrating to him. And because he didn’t really know what they were doing, he really didn’t know what he was doing in relationship to them. So it was all very confusing and not at all something that he would feel comfortable with in any quantifiable sense. He even had difficulty telling whether or not they had a response to what he may or may not have said. But he really didn’t seem to notice anything at that moment. It was all very nebulous and there wasn’t much that he could do about the nebulosity of the situation. All he could really do is sit there and watch them try to communicate with him and whispers that seem to be saying something. But actually probably weren’t saying anything at all. At least not in so far as he could tell. And that was kind of an issue too. Because not knowing exactly what he was doing in relationship to them and not having any real reason to understand what they were doing either and that he really didn’t know how long he had been there and for that matter he really couldn’t seem to remember exactly how he had got to be there in the first place.

It was entirely possible that what was going on is actually not of any real consequence to him. The more he had come to consider the situation the more he had begun to realize that it was entirely possible that he wasn’t actually captive. And though he was tied to a chair he was only tied to the chair by the shadows of ropes. All he really had to do was stand up. And maybe they weren’t really rubs at all. They were just shadows that we’re keeping him where he was. He considered that. He needed to consider all the things that he assumed. Including the fact that they were talking to him at all.

Having made this realization, he began to understand the whispers to be nothing more than strange fluctuations in the ventilation system. There he was in the supply closet. He had no idea how long he’d been there. He was looking around at the shadows I could only look at each other and tried. Much the way he could only look at himself in the truck when he saw himself in the mirror next. On his way out of the supply closet.

The shadows may well have been conferring with each other at that moment. They may well have been considering the situation. They may well have been deciding that perhaps it was a better idea to contact someone else. Of course, they were going to have to work out exactly what it was that they wanted. That was kind of the issue. They kept getting a hold of people and really trying to communicate with them and really trying to get what they wanted. But they never really stop to consider what that might be.

So in the end they ended up dispersing. Quite gradually. The supply closet shifted out of view in the vanishing shadows that could only be exactly where they were on the edge of yet another moment.

editors note:

There are voices in your head, we all hear them too. In the dark, when they think the world can’t touch us, that it can never touch us, the sounds find us. Familiar voices sharing an angry, sharp language. We hear it too. It never hears our answer, either. – tyler malone

A bit about Russ: Russ Bickerstaff is a professional theatre critic and aspiring author living in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with his wife and two daughters. His short fictions have appeared in over 30 different publications including Hypertext Magazine, Pulp Metal Magazine, Sein und Werden, and Theme of Absence.